Microsoft announces Cortana for iOS and Android

Cortana coming to iOS, Android, as part of Windows 10’s embrace of every phone
Phone companion app will help load Microsoft's apps on non-Microsoft phones.

Microsoft is officially confirming earlier that it’s bringing Cortana to iOS and Android. The software giant is planning to release separate apps for each mobile operating system to enable its digital assistant to run outside of Windows. Microsoft is only providing an early look at those apps, but the company notes that you’ll be able to make the same queries and ask the same questions using Cortana across Windows, iOS, or Android. The Cortana companion will be available for Android in late June and iOS later this year.

Confirming March reports that Microsoft would make a Cortana app for iOS and Android, Microsoft announced earlier this week that a Cortana app will ship for Android in late June and for iOS later in the year.

Play The Best Games Only On PS4 | #4ThePlayers

Don't agree with all of these? I don't

Source:  Sony Playstation

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Psypher

Nintendo asks you to pay what you want for indie games

Nintendo's been going through some serious growing pains on its path to the modern era of console gaming but with this latest step it's actually beating Microsoft and Sony to the punch for once. The Japanese gaming company is running a Humble Bundle. Not a Nintendo homegrown version of a Humble Bundle, but a real McCoy on Humble's website. Pretty crazy right? Especially considering these are all indies. Up for grabs are digital codes for games on the 3DS handheld and Wii U alike, including Guacamelee: Super Turbo Championship Edition for the latter and Whoah Dave! for the former.

Those follow Humble's pay-what-you-want model (so long as it's at least $1), but if you drop more than the average donation you'll snag The Fall, OlliOlli and Moon Chronicles Episode 1. Should you feel even more generous, a donation of $10 or more adds Stealth Inc. 2 and SteamWorld Dig to the party. Now, if only Nintendo would jump on this whole mobile gaming fad it'd have its bases covered. Wait...

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Two months after launching on iOS, Periscope hits Android

Not just iOS anymore


Periscope, the live streaming app from Twitter, has been an iOS exclusive since its launch in January but now it's made the jump over to Android as well.

This new app includes a new notification control system some are reporting is an improvement, as well as a new "return to broadcast" feature helping viewers get back to a stream after being interrupted by other phone activity.

You'll get a notification of the stream on your homescreen you can just tap after a phone call to jump right back into the action.

Plus there's also some Material Design elements in the new app including a broadcast button replacing the tab found in iOS.

You can download it from the Google Play Store if your phone's running Android 4.4 KitKat or higher (apparently Google's Play Store is still digesting it), before you get to work on your own citizen journalism/streaming your cooking.

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SEGA LAMENTS 'WEAK' SALES AS ALIEN: ISOLATION SHIFTS 2.1 MILLION

SEGA has released its full-year financial results for the 12 months ending March 30, 2015, revealing sales of packaged software have risen 41 percent year-on-year.

Despite this, the company is apparently disappointed with its 12.3 million sales, branding them "weak", even though its 1 million units more than were forecasted in February. Both Alien: 

Isolatation, which sold 2.11 million, and the 620,000 combined sales of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal were cited as examples. The Persona series has now also managed to sell over 6 million units.

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Overall, the company earned ¥111 billion ($925.7m) in revenue, up 11 percent year-on-year. ¥44.8 billion of this came from physical sales and ¥44.7 billion from digital. Operating income rose to ¥4 billion ($33.4m), around double the previous year. As a whole SEGA earned ¥355 billion ($2.96b) in revenue, down 6.1 percent year-on-year. A new loss of ¥11.3 billion ($94m) makes up the bottom line, which isn't ideal considering last year's profit of ¥30.7 billion.

SEGA is planning to release 46 new free-to-play mobile and PC games in the next year.

Source: IGN

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Has your router been hijacked?

Check it

Has your router been hijacked? You might not have any idea how to answer that question. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to find out… and it’s both fast and free.

Why would you need to check? Because routers aren’t immune from the machinations of cybercriminals; they can be hacked and infected just like our computers can. And since most people don’t pay a lot of attention to their routers once they’re up and running, a compromised one could put users at risk for a long, long time.

DNS hijacking can cause all kinds of nasty problems; it can lead to a flood of malicious advertising or push you toward phishing sites in an attempt to steal credentials for your banking, email, and social network accounts.

That’s why the security experts at F-Secure just announced the launch of their Router Checker tool.

It’s a dead-simple way to find out whether or not your DNS is working the way it should. There’s no app to download and install, it’s just a website that you visit with any modern, standards-compliant browser. Current versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera should all work just fine.

Click the start now button, and Router Checker tests to see if DNS requests sent from your device are being routed as they should be or whether they’re being hijacked by a third party. My machine with Google DNS passed with flying colors. My smartphone was issued a warning, because F-Secure noticed that it was configured with servers that aren’t widely-used — probably because my ISP is comparatively tiny. If you see yellow, it’s not necessarily a reason to panic; just proceed with caution until you can dig a bit deeper.

Some of you in the Geek.com crowd might have things at home locked down well enough that you don’t need to use Router Checker there. Still, it’s a nice site to bookmark and pull up when you’re connecting to less trustworthy access points. When you’re at a coffee shop, library, or in the airport, for example, you might want to fire up F-Secure’s tool and find out what it thinks about your connection.

[Image courtesy of Asim18 on Wikimedia]

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Consoles Aren't Going Anywhere But Big Budget Games Are Dying

With hundreds of millions of console gamers across the globe, the console approach still has a valid market. Yet with news that Alien: Isolation’s 2.11 million sales were deemed “weak” by their publisher, it’s clear that the era of big budget games has had its day.

Alien: Isolation (shown above) is by no means the first of the big budget casualties either, as games like BioShock Infinite, the Tomb Raider reboot and a slew of others have all had budgets that far exceeded the capacity of their final sales.

Even with multi-million unit sales, very few of these big budget games have managed to break-even in recent years.